Monday, February 22, 2016

Milwaukee deputy, friend charged with federal wildlife crimes

A pair of hunters, including a
Milwaukee County sheriff's deputy, have agreed to plead guilty to
bringing a black bear and a timber wolf illegally killed in Ontario into
the U.S.

Reid X. Viertel of West Allis and
Terry Schmit of Franklin are each charged with illegally importing the
bear in 2013, and Viertel faces a second count related to the
importation of the timber wolf in 2012.

Schmit, a 19-year veteran of the
sheriff's office, was placed on administrative duty earlier this month
for failing to report that he was under federal investigation.

Each count is punishable by up to a
year in jail and $100,000 fine, plus a year of extended supervision. The
charges, federal misdemeanors, and the plea agreements were filed
Thursday. No hearing dates have been set.

As part of the plea bargain, both men gave up their rights to fish, hunt or trap wildlife in North America until 2021.

Each has already pleaded guilty in
Ontario to various offenses related to the same incidents and together
were fined a total of $11,000 and banned from hunting there for 15
years. The court there found Viertel had forged documents to obtain
export licenses, among other violations.

According to Milwaukee federal court records:

In 2014, the Ontario Ministry of
Natural Resources suspected Viertel and other Wisconsin residents of
operating illegal hunting and guiding services around Dryden,
about 120 miles north of International Falls, Minn. The OMNR asked the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for assistance in the investigation.

The Ontario authorities found a
Viertel Facebook post about game he and associates supposedly took in
Ontario, but the authorities found no record of him having been licensed
to do so.

They did find an export permit
Viertel got in February 2013 for four wolves, two foxes, a fisher and
three weasels, all of which he claimed were gifted to him by a Canadian
trapper.

Viertel gave a similar story about
the bear he tried to export in 2013, saying it was also a gift, from a
different Ontario resident. Viertel, Schmit and the Ontario man had
registered the bear there, but claimed the local man had shot it.

However, investigators saw a post on
Viertel's Facebook page of the men with the bear, claiming Schmit had
taken it. He did not have a license to hunt bear in Ontario.

The Ontario man under whose license the bear had been registered told investigators Schmit shot the bear.

When U.S. authorities interviewed
Viertel in February 2014, he gave conflicting accounts about who shot
the bear and the wolf he had imported in 2012.

Schmit told the U.S. investigators he
did not shoot the bear, though he admitted telling everyone except the
Canadian natural resources officials that he did. He also admitted
paying to have the bear mounted, and that it was on display at his
house. It was later seized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

By August 2015, Schmit had changed his story and admitted killing the bear illegally, and to importing illegally with Viertel.

The film offers an abbreviated history of the relationship between wolves and people—told from the wolf’s perspective—from a time when they coexisted to an era in which people began to fear and exterminate the wolves.

The return of wolves to the northern Rocky Mountains has been called one of America’s greatest conservation stories. But wolves are facing new attacks by members of Congress who are gunning to remove Endangered Species Act protections before the species has recovered.

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Inescapably, the realization was being borne in upon my preconditioned mind that the centuries-old and universally accepted human concept of wolf character was a palpable lie... From this hour onward, I would go open-minded into the lupine world and learn to see and know the wolves, not for what they were supposed to be, but for what they actually were.

-Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf

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“If you look into the eyes of a wild wolf, there is something there more powerful than many humans can accept.” – Suzanne Stone